Review the important moments of Flutter 2021 and welcome the new year with the cover of the Year of the Tiger red envelope!

In 2021, Flutter officially entered the official version of the 2.x series. The release of Flutter 2 at the opened a new "pattern", adding the fifth feature to Flutter - " portability " , let Flutter officially "upgrade" from a mobile framework to a "portable framework", the goal is to make Flutter applications run on multiple platforms basically unchanged. With Flutter, developers can create beautiful, fast, and portable applications for any platform. In March, in addition to the released by the web platform, Flutter also began to expand to desktop, foldable and embedded devices. The accompanying release of Dart 2.12 official release provides robust null safety and production-level support for FFI. Dart is a "secret weapon" standing behind Flutter. Many of the "flash points" of Flutter we mentioned are actually largely due to Dart: including the well-known stateful hot-reload (Stateful Hot-Reload) , and the maturity of Dart FFI supports the "portability" mentioned in Flutter 2, and the performance improvement in the latest Flutter 2.8 stable version is inseparable from Dart.

The I/O conference in late May is still held online, and the stable versions of 161f5f12f2a13f Flutter 2.2 Dart 2.13 In addition to the evolving web support, Flutter has also made a lot of performance improvements on the mobile platform, and has also started to improve Flutter from the basic side to other platforms. Flutter 2.2 focuses on improving the development experience. New projects will automatically enable sound null safety by default. Flutter's developer tools (DevTools) and IDE plugins have been improved and updated. DartPad also adds a guided code experience for educators. Dart 2.13 adds more updates to null safety and introduces the much-anticipated new feature of "type aliases".

A very important role in the Flutter ecosystem is to revolve around some Dart Packages released by Flutter. These packages greatly help developers build Flutter applications better. FlutterFire is an officially maintained collection of plugins that facilitate the integration of Flutter applications with Firebase services. The official also handed over a batch of plugins maintained by itself to the community for maintenance, which indicates that Flutter is far from being the only Google engineering team working alone. The entire community is making continuous contributions to Flutter. In addition to the contributions of the vast developer community members, Toyota, Canonical, Samsung, Sony, and Microsoft are all continuing to contribute to Flutter. Flutter is not only for developers, but also for designers. Adobe XD is a UI/UX design and collaboration tool. You can use the xd-to-flutter plugin to easily convert design drafts into Flutter that supports null safety code. During I/O, the Flutter team also released and open-sourced a web application built with Flutter and Firebase - "Flutter Photo Booth" in conjunction with the VGV team. As a sample application, developers can learn how the application is built well camera experience, optimize the web application experience, and use Firebase to complete business logic.

In September 21st, Flutter updated to 2.5 official version , Dart also released 2.14 official version , this version still continues some of the past work, continues to make some important performance and tool improvements, and also adds to Material You support, etc. Since this version, Dart's support for Apple chips has been officially launched in the stable channel, and many shared code lint tools have been added. The scoring engine on pub.dev has also begun to use some of the lint rules, and the package publishing tool has also supported Identify and use .gitignore to declare what to ignore, avoid uploading useless code snippets, etc. With the introduction of Dart's null-safety features, many application developers and package developers have followed suit and implemented robust null-safety features. In addition to steadily updating the Flutter mobile performance and development experience, Flutter Web also released a product roadmap , striving to make the experience of Flutter applications on the web platform more natural. The Flutter team relies almost entirely on GitHub and other open source open platforms for collaboration. All processes and code improvements are open and transparent to the community. Therefore, we are also working very hard to promote domestic developers to participate in global community contributions, and in every development developer survey, many new features and improvements will be released on GitHub Issues and open for feedback. The more feedback and interactions from developers, the more attention the Flutter team will pay attention to, and the more resources will be invested in solving them.

Judging from the number of applications in the Play Store, the number of Flutter applications rose from 150,000+ in the first quarter of 21 to 200,000+ in the second quarter. At the same time, from April to May 21, there were more than one-eighth of the Play Store. The number of Flutter apps on the Play Store at the end of 2021 almost doubled compared to the second quarter, reaching 375,000+ apps. These numbers are a testament to the popularity of Flutter and its adoption and love by more and more developers. The adoption and love of Flutter by developers is also reflected in many developer reports. The report of the analysis company SlashData shows that Flutter is the most popular cross-platform development framework today, with 45% of the interviewed developers choosing; RedMonk ranks Mentioned in "Dart has risen significantly"; StackOverflow's developer survey shows that Dart ranks seventh among developers' favorite programming languages, and Flutter ranks second among favorite frameworks; JetBrains 2021 State of the developer ecosystem report shows , In terms of cross-platform mobile framework selection, Flutter's popularity continues to grow, and has surpassed React Native to become the most popular cross-platform mobile framework. The top companies and applications using Flutter also include BMW, ByteDance, Didi, eBay, Grab, Greggs, Shell, Norton, Philips Hue, PUBG, SHEIN, trip.com, WeChat, etc. (*The ranking is in no particular order). At the end of 21, the number of Flutter developers in the world has reached more than 3 million, and Flutter has also evolved from the original "portable UI toolkit" to "a UI platform for environmental computing".

The last stable update in 2021 released Flutter 2.8 and Dart 2.15 , this release focuses on the performance of the mobile platform, due to the redesign and implementation of The memory consumed by isolate is reduced by up to 100 times, which is reflected in the Flutter application, the performance such as startup performance and memory usage have been greatly improved. At the same time, in order to facilitate developers to debug application performance, the new version of the developer tools (DevTools) Added an Enhance Tracing function for diagnosing expensive widget construction, layout and drawing operations that cause UI freezes. In terms of the platform view of the web (PlatformView), version 2.8 will reuse the canvas created before the platform view to improve performance and reduce scrolling stuck. Focusing on the package ecology, a series of Firebase-related plug-ins and plug-ins of the Google Mobile Ads SDK have been updated this time. At the same time, you can also directly use some Firebase plug-ins and other packages through DartPad tools. 2.8 also took a big step forward in the support of the desktop side. The official also recently solicited Flutter desktop application from global developers to expand the test coverage and provide more guarantees for the stable support of Flutter desktop.

Looking back on 2021, Flutter's development momentum is and the potential is unlimited. Looking forward to 2022, even more confident. Especially the desktop version is advanced, and a new Flutter product update will be released soon. This release is aimed at Windows desktop application developers. It will be released on February 4th, China time (the fourth day of the first lunar month), and we will also pay attention to it at that time. and push the latest information.

The Lunar New Year is approaching, and I wish you all the best of luck in the Year of the Tiger, all Flutter developers! May all bad things vanish, may the order of this world be restored as soon as possible, and we are free to meet the people we want and hug each other. I sincerely wish all readers, family and friends good health and happiness!

We have prepared two Flutter red envelope covers for you this year, namely Dash Tiger Cap and Dash Welcome New Year (the Spring Festival style can be obtained through the red envelope page). Last year's three little baldheads also returned for a limited time. I wish all developers The Year of the Tiger is prosperous, and achieve great results again!